I've been based in Washington, D.C. now for over eight years. During that time, I've met no more honorable man than Dr. Walid Phares, a true gentleman and one of the world's top analysts on terrorism, jihad, and the Middle East.

Through the years, Walid has been kind enough to appear as a guest on CBN programs, including my show, Stakelbeck on Terror (most recently for an eye-opening 30-minute special on Hezbollah).

As you can see from his bio, Walid--a Fox News analyst, bestselling author, esteemed scholar and advisor to both the U.S. Congress and European Parliament on counterterrorism issues--has impeccable credentials in his field. I can tell you from working in the nation's capital now for close to a decade that Walid's insights are valued and respected by both sides of the political aisle.

That's why it's particularly infuriating to see Walid be subjected as of late to a vicious smear campaign by a coalition of hard leftists and Muslim Brotherhood-linked Islamists. The reason? It was announced earlier this month that Walid is serving as one of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romey's senior advisors on national security and the Middle East.

As if on cue, the Islamo-leftist attack dogs swooped in with a barrage of lies and distortions, many of which made me laugh out loud in astonishment, followed by righteous anger.

Over at National Review Online, Mario Loyola calls out the culprits and then dispatches them with ease. Here's a snippet:

Phares has lived in the United States since 1990. Other than membership in organizations committed to resisting Syria’s and Hezbollah’s domination of Lebanon (fully in line with longstanding U.S. policy) Phares’s career remains what it has always been — that of a major writer and intellectual on Mideast affairs.

That is the real reason for the anti-Phares campaign. It is not his association with the Lebanese Forces but his message that bothers them. And here Mother Jones has simply fabricated a story. Rather than take the trouble to peruse one of Phares’s many books, Serwer quotes people who dimly remember what they think they heard Phares say 30 years ago.

He dredged up a former activist Lebanese, who was 18 years old at the time of the events in question; she says she recalls that Phares “justified our fighting against the Muslims by saying we should have our own country, our own state, our own entity, and we have to be separate.”

If Mother Jones had actually bothered to investigate as part of its “investigation,” it would have found a major reason to doubt the veracity of this account, namely that Phares was writing books and articles at the time consistently advocating the preservation of Lebanon as a confederation. He has never been a separatist, which is why Mother Jones wasn’t able to find a quote by Phares himself to back up its story, despite Phares’s decades of public statements and hundreds of publications.

Another source assures Mother Jones that Phares “is telling people to suspect all Muslims [sic] Americans as something other than how they portray themselves.” Notice that Serwer couldn’t find a quote from Phares actually saying anything like that. But, as Bob Woodward has taught us, sometimes you just have to rely on paraphrase and hearsay to put words in people’s mouths, because your fabricated narrative will fall apart if you portray people as they actually portray themselves in their own words.

Read it all. It seems the Red/Green alliance of Islamists and leftists has gone into overdrive in recent months to attack any American who dares speak truthfully on matters of jihad and Sharia and the true agenda of groups like the Muslim Brotherhood. When good and courageous men like Walid Phares are attacked, we can't remain silent--the stakes are too high for our nation.